“Let’s immobilize her just the way she is,” one of the attendants said. “I think we can do that.”
I kept out of the way. I don’t think the emergency crew even knew I was there. I recognized the deputy sheriff even in the tricky light of the spots and flashlights. But it was no time for a reunion with Estelle Reyes-Guzman.
I took the opportunity to step to the rail and beam my own flashlight down into the rocks. There was no vehicle in sight. Maybe the victim had been a pedestrian, maybe drunk. They had said “she.” Maybe she’d staggered into the path of a car and been clipped. If so, it had to have been hit-and-run. If the man up the road with the Buick had been involved, they sure as hell wouldn’t have left him up there by himself, directing traffic.
I turned away from the rail and took a closer look. The victim was female and appeared to be young, perhaps in her twenties. I didn’t have much of a view but she looked vaguely familiar to me.
The attendants transferred her to the gurney with a minimum of movement, and I could see from the extent of their emergency field dressings that she was hurt in a dozen places. One leg was bent near the hip at an impossible angle.
With a coordinated effort the two paramedics picked up the gurney and carried the victim to the ambulance. I felt a hand on my arm and turned.
“You’re just in time,” Estelle Reyes-Guzman said. “I saw you drive up.”
Miss Sharp Eyes hadn’t missed me after all. “Yeah,” I said. “I was camping out and you woke me up. What have you got here?”
“I don’t know.”
“Pedestrian?”
Estelle played her flashlight over the area where the victim’s body had been. “Let me show you.” We walked to the guardrail. “We have a single victim, as far as we can tell right now. Haven’t found anyone else. The gentleman who owns the Buick up where you parked saw her first and used his CB radio. The owner of the all-night convenience store up at the head of the canyon heard him and called me. She was lying right here when I arrived. Les Cook with the Forest Service had stopped before I got here. He’s over there working traffic. He said the same thing. She was lying here, part under the rail.”
“Sounds like she got hit pretty hard,” I said. “A little more and she’d have been down in the rocks and probably wouldn’t have been found for days.”
“I think that’s where she was,” Estelle said. “Look here.” She motioned for me to bend over the steel guardrail. “Don’t step over yet, though,” she added as she saw me make a move to do just that. “See right here?” She pointed and held the light close. On the back flange of the rail were bloody fingerprints. “I think she grabbed here to help pull herself up to the rail.”
“Is there blood on the bottom of the flange?” I asked. “If she grabbed ahold, her thumbprint would be on the bottom.”
Estelle crouched down low and ducked her head. The bottom of the rail was about eighteen inches off the ground, and she played the beam of the flashlight along the steel surface. “There’s blood opposite,” she said. “Look here.”
“I’ll take your word for it.” If I had scrunched down in that position, I’d never have gotten up. I turned the light to shine on the slope. The rocky incline was just highway fill, and the scuff marks that might be made by someone crawling up the slope would be hard to see…especially by flashlight. Undaunted, Estelle stepped over the rail and examined the ground.
“Lots of blood,” she said, and she worked her way carefully down the steep slope, keeping her own feet off to one side of the track she was following. “I think she crawled up here. See the dislodged rocks?”
“You need to look at it in daylight.”
“I’ll take a set of pictures now. Can I get you to hold the light so I can focus?”
“Of course.” I knew Estelle’s affinity for photography. When she worked for my county, our film-processing bill had been astronomical. But her results were equally so.
Before she went to work, we made the highway a little safer. I walked south and stabbed a flare in the centerline, and then we repositioned the cones, Estelle’s county car, and my Blazer. After taking down what information we needed from the man in the Buick, we let him go. He didn’t waste any time. The timber cop agreed to stay for a while and manage traffic…I think two cars had gone by since I had arrived.
Estelle set up her 35mm camera and took a series of photos of the slope, each picture downhill from the last, while I held the flashlight so she could focus. The electronic flash was like a lightning bolt in the narrow canyon.
When she was satisfied, she said, “We can take a close look come dawn, but this way, if it rains or something, we’re covered a little. Look here.”
I did and could see that the blood trail turned at the base of the steepest part of the embankment and then angled away to the south.
“The way she was broken up, moving that far took some set of nerves,” I said.
Estelle took more pictures. Together we followed the trail. The girl had crawled, apparently pulling herself forward with only her hands and sheer will, for fifty yards along the base of the embankment before trying to climb it. The trail led back through a thick stand of grass, and we saw the crushed stems left by the girl’s passing. The grass gave way to a jumble of boulders, and a smear of blood on one of them showed us where the girl had slid off the rock into the grass.
“Christ,” I said. Estelle muttered something and reloaded her camera. She started up on the rocks, and I said quickly, “Watch for the goddamned snakes.” She ignored the warning.
“I think this is it,” Estelle said.
“ ‘It’ what?”
Estelle played the flashlight on the rocks. From where she stood, the highway embankment up to the guardrails was a seventy- or eighty-degree slope. “The blood ends here,” she said. “At least I can’t see any more.”
“Nothing coming down from the roadway?”
“Not that I can see. Shine your light right up here.” She indicated the slope. I did so, and she snapped more pictures. “I don’t see any scuff marks,” she added and then climbed down to where I stood. “I want to climb up the embankment over there, where we won’t be apt to obliterate anything. Maybe there are marks up by the highway.”
We made the climb, with me huffing and puffing. There were no marks on the highway shoulder, nothing on the steel rail. The only marks on the highway’s road surface itself were two short skid marks, about twenty yards south of where Estelle’s patrol car was parked. The marks were straight and centered in the lane, as if someone had spiked the brakes without swerving. The marks were short-the vehicle hadn’t been traveling fast.
“They might not even be related,” I said.
“And probably aren’t,” Estelle said. She took pictures anyway.
“So what do you think?” I asked as she put the camera gear back in the trunk of her car.
“I just don’t know, sir. I really don’t. It looks like she was struck and knocked over the rail back there, maybe hit so hard she flew over it, and landed on the rocks. Then she crawled to where we found her. That’s all I can imagine.” She frowned.
“Maybe,” I said. “But if someone gets nailed by a car hard enough to toss ’em down a goddamned cliff onto rocks, I can’t believe they’d survive, much less be able to crawl so far.”
“That’s what bothers me,” Estelle said. “Maybe we’ll be able to piece something together when we have the medical report.”
“She didn’t have any identification?”
“None.”
“Terrific.” I looked at my watch. It was already quarter of five. “What now?”
“I want to walk down along the road and see if I come up with anything. And then up the other way. By then it’ll be dawn and we can see what we missed.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“You’re on vacation, sir.”
“Pretend I’m not. I had a couple hours of vacation yesterday. That was probably enough.”